Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigration enforcement | Hacker News Reader

Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigration enforcement

wsj.com

After reading the story, I feel the main point is not about immigration enforcement. The main point here is that the government agencies bought anonymized marketing data and used them for law enforcement purpose.

On the one hand I do feel the danger here. On the other hand, it seems there's no legal barrier to prevent government agencies from purchasing data available for regular corporations.

IMHO, the scandal here is not that the data was sold or bought. That's bad, but that was going to happen as soon as it had been collected. So the collection is the real scandal here, and it's a harder problem to solve too, because the responsibility is distributed on thousands of people and companies, and because to some degree the users are actually complicit (through wilful ignorance, or through knowingly accepting it for whatever reasons).

The good news is there would be technical fixes for this problem. "Simply" don't use any of the currently infringing apps. Which -- yes -- means fundamentally changing the way we build, distribute, and fund mobile and web apps. It's not easy in practice, but the technical aspect of it is not complicated.

It's gonna be harder to avoid carriers from triangulating a coarse location, but that's an "easy" think to regulate since there are not so many of them. Again, "easy" in big quotes, because of course politically that's gonna be difficult. The regulators want this information to be collected.

Just for those unaware, the first cases of cellphone "tower dumping" for triangulation was for bank robbery cases. It was used to find unknown suspects who were near cases across time.

Fast-forward to today, where selling access to LEO is a 7-figure business for all of the telcos.

Never underestimate how lazy LEO are.

I don't underestimate that, but I'm amazed how many crimes still go unsolved with criminals leaving their digital crumbs. I highly doubt that many criminals are smart enough to simply leave the phone behind when committing the crime.

https://archive.md/2kPaU

A self-important and auhoritarian Leader effectively above the law...check

A completely submissive party apparatus of spineless functionaries nodding of presidential decrees.

Unrestricted access to everyone cellphones records... check

ensure all communication is monitored by pressuring tech companies with regressive laws to drop end to end encryption ... check

Facial recognition AI provided by tech companies... check

A dedicated presidential TV channel broadcasting official spin and fictional realities ... check

Aggressive enforcement action and internment camps for minorities ... check

Whistleblowers being intimidated and retaliated against ... check

China sure is looking bad these days /s

1. Why would I care? I actually like having more relevant ads.

2. Why should I care? If they're gonna have a border we should equip them to protect it.

3. Why should I care? I haven't done anything wrong.

4. No seriously, I swear I didn't do anything wrong. I never went to those Union meetings. You can check my track!

I think the poison here is government, not the tool. It makes sense for a government to look for location data to persecute its declared enemies.

Government is just doing what government inherently does - attempting to exert control over anything legible to it. The underlying problem is the longstanding insecurity of cell protocols that creates these irresistible databases of everyone's location in the first place.

How would you design a cell protocol that prevented signal triangulation? Seems essentially impossible.

Hiding the location of a radio itself is likely infeasible (with sector antennas, each tower actually knows a signal strength and a rough vector).

However, what is avoidable are fixed IDs like IMSI and IMEI that allow persistent tracking of the "same device" or "same user" across every tower. The routing functions of IMEI could easily be replaced with a nonce that changed for every registration. The billing functions of IMSI could be replaced with blinded tokens. And the persistent identity of phone numbers could be provided by independent parties like with email, ideally over a (non-wireless) mix network.

Declared *processes. Calling targets enemies is editorializing at best.

Welcome to step number two... :/

Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. It leads to generic ideological discussion, which leads to repetitive flamewar, which is tedious, which is off topic here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I don't see how this is ideological but the other top comment in this thread isn't. They both convey an emotional sentiment without any real information or substantive insights. Why do people who make blunt but direct posts get chastised while people who are parroting alarmist talking points without adding citations or evidence get a pass? It seems like an obvious enforcement bias.

Hmmm... I'm not sure if you're attacking or defending my statement here. :P But I'd like to say I disagree with the "without any real information" part of your argument.

Looking at these things without taking into account prior similar cases will lead to sub-optimal decisions, because if you don't take into account that similar stories have played out before, you'll have to take the industry's word for it that "this data will only be used to sell you stuff." And later you'll have to take the government's word for it that "we'll only use this to defend the border." And so on.

But we have seen these things play out before. That is why "First they came for..." was written. We can already predict how this going to go from here. And personally, I don't like the way it's going.

This comment seemed like generic "doesn't affect me" flamebait at first; after a 2nd reading I'm not sure if that's the right interpretation. The format of 3 repeating dismissive statements followed by a final statement about falling victim to the previously dismissed problem could be interpreted as a variation on Martin Niemöller's famous poem "First they came ..."[1]. In this interpretation, the comment in line #4 about "those Union meetings" might be a clever reference to "Then they came for the trade unionists" in original poem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...#Text

It's always nice to know that someone here will get the reference even if I go to bed right after posting. It's important that this crowd here knows these things.

I'm sorry to be critical, but that reference is not just obvious, it's an internet trope that passed being a cliché years ago and is an implicit Godwinning of the thread. Comments of that form are intrinsically off topic here.

I don't think that's an accurate reading of the comment you're responding to. On the contrary, the poster seems to be making a slippery-slope argument about the specific issue the article is about: the bleedover from surveillance capitalism to empowering law enforcement, and the reasons people might support this now but regret it later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com